SSC CGL 2025 Tier-I · 24 September 2025, Shift 2 · English Comprehension · Question 12 of 100

We transcribed this text from the pictures on a candidate's response sheet for this shift; the answer is the key SSC colour-marked on that sheet. Solution last reviewed 13 September 2026.

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 diposit 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]?

(a)recuperative
(b)apophatic
(c)regulatory
(d)valorized

Answer

Why

Correct — B. The sentence reads: 'In this schema, freedom is not recuperative but [5] _______—a rupture from taxonomic legibility, a departure from the logocentric compulsion to be known.'

Not recuperative but sets the blank against recovery. The gloss after the dash defines it: freedom as a break from being classified and known.

Apophatic means known or described only by negation, by what something is not. A freedom that escapes names and categories is exactly that → option (b).

Why the others are wrong

(a)
recuperative — Recuperative is the word the sentence negates: 'not recuperative but [5]'. Filling the blank with it would call freedom recuperative and not recuperative at once.
(c)
regulatory — Regulatory means controlling by rules. A regulating freedom belongs to the classifying order the gloss breaks from: freedom here is 'a rupture from taxonomic legibility'.
(d)
valorized — Valorized means given value by others. The passage uses the verb for the regime it opposes, technologies 'that valorize some corporealities', so a valorized freedom stays inside that regime.

Concept

The blank sits in a not X but Y frame followed by a gloss. Y must oppose X, and the words after the dash say what Y is: a rupture from taxonomic legibility, a departure from the compulsion to be known.

Apophatic comes from theology, where it names knowing God only by negation, by saying what God is not.

Carried over, an apophatic freedom refuses to be named or known, which is what the gloss says.

Apophatic is rare outside theology and philosophy, so work by elimination: recuperative is the negated word, and regulatory and valorized belong to the order the passage resists. What remains, apophatic, fits the gloss once you know its sense.

Key facts

Apophatic: describing something, originally God, by negation, by what it is not.
Apophatic comes from Greek apophanai, 'to deny'.
Its opposite in theology is cataphatic (or kataphatic): describing God by positive statements.
Recuperative: helping to recover or restore.

Study next

Apophatic and cataphaticReading the gloss after a dash to fill a cloze blankNegation frames in cloze: not X but Y, not merely X but Y

Common traps

Picking recuperative because it is printed just before the blank. The sentence negates it.
Rejecting apophatic only because it is unfamiliar, when each familiar option clashes with the sentence.

The same 'not X but [blank]—' frame, glossed after the dash, ends the passage at 23 Sep 2025, 09:00, English Q.12: 'is not identity but [5] _____—a presence that eludes', keyed fugitive form.

Blanks [3] and [4] of this passage are English Q.10 and Q.11.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.

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 diposit 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.