An article here on Zizek, Badiou and the subject, poses the following question:
“To return to our initial question, why are we seeing this resurgence of early Christian topoi in cultural theory today? And why are these topoi all tricked out as attempts to think in a contemporary mode the materiality of the subject? To put it differently, why is the Pauline subject being peddled as the subject of our time, and why precisely as one that functions as a potential revelation of materiality?”
The problem here is that the terms in which these questions are couched in fact preempt what is at issue. 'Tricked out', 'peddled' both imply the same thing: That the phenomena in question are only a disguised form of something else, and what we have to do is determine why they have taken this particular form or semblance. But this content/ semblance distinction is precisely what is being contested and turned round. For it is the work of St. Paul which is the semblance or form wherein an authentic concept of the subject is couched. There is a 'theory' of the subject here, but it is 'tricked out' in Christian language and awaits completion and decoding by the present.
In other words, the hermeneutic at work here is close to that of the utopian, redemptive intelligence as it appears, for example, in Marx's famous Letter to Ruge (1843):
So our campaign slogan must be: reform of consciousness, not through dogma, but through the analysis of that mystical consciousness which has not yet become clear to itself. It will then turn out that the world has long dreamt of that of which it only had to have a clear idea to possess it really. It will turn out that it is not a quesiton of any conceptual rupture between past and future, but rather of the completion of the thoughts of the past.
This is not to suggest that Badiou subscribes exactly to this 'Blochian' hermeneutic, but there is an analagous understanding at work. The task: delivering from the past meanings which otherwise pass incognito, and extracting the moment of truth from what is indeed, at a purely conceptual level, false.
At this point I refer the reader to Jameson's chapter on Bloch from Marxism and Form, from which this is taken:
What Marxism shares with Christianity is primarily a historical situation: for it now projects that claim to universality and that attempt to establish a universal culture which characterised Christianity in the declining years of the Roman Empire and at the height of the Middle Ages.