SarkariPYQ

SSC CGL 2025 PYQ — Question 18

SSC CGL - 24 Sep 2025 - Shift 2 • English • Q18

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In the following passage, some words have been deleted. Read the passage intently and choose the most appropriate option to fill in each blank.

To conceive of gender as ontologically prior or naturally originary is to misrecognize its status as a [1] ________, a semiotic and performative topology whose coherence is secured only through its reiteration across spatial, legal, and psychic apparatuses. Within this regime, embodiment is not merely lived but mediated—filtered through hermeneutic technologies that valorize some corporealities while rendering others abject, deviant, or structurally unintelligible. The state, in tandem with biomedical epistemes and juridico-political grammars, exercises a necropolitical calibration of life itself—where recognition is not a right but a [2] ________ allocated via matrices of intelligibility that are historically contingent and politically fungible. This deposit if renders gender a function of discursive legibility rather than biological inevitability. Resistance, when funneled through these grammars, risks becoming complicit in the very structures it seeks to subvert. Hence, the radical task is not merely to 'expand' recognition but to effect a [3] ________ of recognition's ontological architecture. This entails refusing the dialectics of inclusion and exclusion that liberal frameworks offer and instead exposing their constitutive foreclosure of alterity. Such a politics necessitates the [4] ________ of normativity as a structuring logic of embodiment. Only through its unmaking can a post-identitarian ethics of becoming be envisioned—one that privileges contingency over coherence, opacity over transparency, and relational indeterminacy over categorical fixity. In this schema, freedom is not recuperative but [5] ________—a rupture from taxonomic legibility, a departure from the logocentric compulsion to be known.

What should come in the place of blank number [5]?

Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: B

Explanation

The correct answer is option 2 i.e. epophatic.

 

The final sentence describes a form of freedom that acts as a 'rupture' from being classified or labeled. It emphasizes 'opacity over transparency' and a 'departure from the logocentric compulsion to be known.' The blank requires a word that describes a state of being or a type of freedom that is defined by what it is not, or by its refusal to be captured by standard language and categories.

Grammatical concept:

  • Epophatic (Apophatic): Derived from the Greek word apophasis (meaning 'negation'), this term is often used in 'apophatic theology' or 'negative theology.' It refers to a way of describing something (often the divine or the absolute) only in terms of what it is not, rather than what it is.

  • In context: The passage uses 'epophatic' (a variant or related term to apophatic in specific theoretical discourses) to mean a freedom that resists being 'recuperated' or defined by the state's 'taxonomic legibility.' It is a freedom found in the 'unnameable' or the 'unknown.'

Correct word: epophatic

Hence, the chosen option is correct.