This paper explores the figure of the Emperor of Man from Warhammer 40,000 as a Master Signifier, situating him within the psychoanalytic traditions of Freud and Lacan while drawing a sharp contrast with the messianic hope articulated in the ethical philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. In Freudian and Lacanian theory, the Father—whether as Oedipal figure or Name-of-the-Father—functions to structure desire, impose symbolic order, and mask the absence at the heart of the symbolic. The Emperor, enthroned yet dead, both embodies and parodies this function: he is a sovereign whose absolute authority secures the imperium’s symbolic order even in death, repressing both lack and the Infinite play of difference. The Golden Throne allows for differentiation but not “differance”, maintains an individuated fraternity, which in its turn, realizes (manifests) the eventuality of Roboute Guilliman. Contrast this with Necrons’ undifferentiated patricide. The imperium’s repressive unity contrasts starkly with the ethical messianism of Levinas and Derrida, for whom the messiah does not come to fulfil totality but to interrupt it. Where the Emperor forecloses the Other in the name of survival, Levinasian messianism opens the self to the infinite demand of alterity. Derrida’s “à venir” resists the closure of the signifier, while the Emperor calcifies it. This paper argues that the Emperor operates as a hyperbolic Master Signifier that reveals the violence implicit in the Freudian and Lacanian structuring of the symbolic order, and in doing so, dramatizes the tension between sovereign authority and ethical openness. Through this contrast, the paper stages a philosophical encounter between psychoanalytic method (law) and deconstructive ethics, between the Father who guarantees meaning and the messianic who ruptures it. Its conclusion is provocative: the true heir of the imperium is not Roboute Guilliman. It is Magnus the Red.
Author bio
My name is Tobin Johnston. I’m a writer and award-winning poet based in Oregon. With a B.A. in Liberal Arts from Gutenberg College and an M.A. in Philosophy from Bushnell University. My undergraduate thesis, “Let Old Idols Learn What It Means to Have Legs of Clay”, explored Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue through the philosophies of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. My master’s thesis, “Murmur: A Diachronic Exposition of Moses”, examined the philosophy of Moses through scriptural and Derridean lenses.
I was the founding editor of The Rooftile – A Journal of Philosophy and the Arts (2004–2009), and my poetry and fiction have appeared in Verseweavers, The Black Elephant Lit., and Rain, Party, & Disaster Society. In 2009, I received first place in the Oregon Poetry Association’s “Poet of Witness” category for my poem “A Picture Taken at a Hotel.” At the 2013 Gutenberg Summer Institute, I presented a paper titled, “Eschatologists Agree that the End of Human History Is Fast Approaching. What My Paper Presupposes is… maybe it isn’t.”
