The Imperium of Mankind perpetuates itself through the mechanical reproduction of a vast number of social fantasies, the most universal being belief in the omniscience of the God-Emperor. To be an Imperial subject, one must, often under pain of death, publicly profess an obvious falsehood: that humanity is led by an all-powerful protector, whose will remains unbound by any law of Nature or the Warp.
Starting from the theoretical framework of Jacques Lacan’s Four Formulas of Sexuation, and especially its application to the Primal Father who bounds the closed set of All Men, I propose a return to Slavoj Zizek’s 1989 reading of totalitarian fantasy through the lens of Lacan’s Graph of Desire. This research shall explore how the Imperial subject’s mandatory abhorrence for the mutant, the xenos, and the heretic both perpetuates and demonstrates the truth of the claim that the skeletal being kept alive by the daily intervention of its followers constitutes a symbolically uncastrated, all-powerful deity. The Imperium of Mankind is thus ultimately totalized as a sound social body, a closed set, by exclusion of the symbolically over-determined fetish, the non-human/non-imperial subject.
This research direction may hold interest not just for fans of Games Workshop’s apocalyptic settings, but also for academics exploring the self-fulfilling potential of counterfactual pronouncement as common to the authoritarian fantasies of today as they were to those darkly satirized by the authors of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and Rogue Trader forty years ago.
Author bio
Long-time fellow traveller with the Philadelphia Lacan Group and occasional nuisance at Theory Underground, Jacob Thomas has been an autism professional with the Berkeley Unified School District for 19 years, where they apply Lacanian principles like Pseudo-Signification and the Protective Rim to the daily practice of neurodivergent education.
