Faceless trauma: war as ma imagine, not an esperience

28 February 2026, Tehran. Operations ‘Epic Fury’ and ‘Roar of the Lion’, coordinated by the United States and Israel, launch the first air strikes on the Iranian capital, killing the regime’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and several government officials. Other cities across the country are bombed, and the Strait of Hormuz is immediately closed.

Less than a month after the apparent lull in the large-scale street protests, Iran is back at the centre of the West’s digital spectacle. War unfolds before our eyes, suffering becomes a stream of content, and reality is present only in the tamed form of representation. This media phenomenon breaks away from the journalistic logic of news reporting, taking on a precise definition: the spectacularisation of trauma.

According to sociologist Jeffrey C. Alexander, cultural trauma is a symbolic and social process. An event becomes traumatic only when it is interpreted and represented as such by a collectivity, producing wounds and fractures in its shared identity and memory. Iran thus emerges as an emblematic case through which to reinterpret this dynamic: the war is produced—also—by the West, yet here it is consumed as simulation, as image. Trauma exceeds direct involvement and arrives directly on our screens, and not only there.

Yet the effects of the conflict do not remain invisible. One week after the bombings in Tehran, the STOXX 600—an index grouping the main stocks listed on European markets—registered a total loss of approximately 918 billion euros in market capitalisation, closing between –0.6% and –1%. Two weeks into the conflict, the Wall Street Journal reported the assessment of a senior Pentagon official estimating losses of 25–35 billion dollars, while domestic inflation has now reached 3.8%, the highest level in three years. Since 4 March, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has prevented 90% of ships from transiting, blocking the circulation of one fifth of the world’s oil and one quarter of its natural gas, with severe economic repercussions. This is not merely a matter of paying more at the fuel pump.

The petrochemical, logistics and agri-food sectors are just some of those severely affected by the skyrocketing prices, which are hampering supply and affordability. The economic crisis is making itself felt in everyday life, with people complaining at petrol stations or at airports about cancelled flights, against a backdrop of palpable geopolitical fragility and instability. Economic disruption becomes the point at which war ceases to be only an image and returns as the Real within our material lives. Yet this return does not truly fracture our perception. The economic crisis loses the conflictual context in which it originated, becoming graphs, percentages, and technical analyses: it does not become trauma, nor collective memory. It is here that what Žižek calls the ‘Desert of the Real’ opens up, a space in which the Real bursts in but is immediately neutralised as a representation.

However, in the case of the war in Iran, the perception of the event has something unique about it. In 2002, Slavoj Žižek drew a cinematic parallel offering a surprising post-ideological interpretation. In Welcome to the Desert of the Real, his analysis aims to highlight the fracture in the shared symbolic order of New York’s citizens following the 9/11 attacks. For those present at the World Trade Center that day, the attack represented a traumatic irruption of the Real—in the Lacanian sense—accompanied by the collapse of a protected and virtualised Western reality. The title of Žižek’s essay refers to Morpheus’s famous line in The Matrix, when Neo is shown the world behind the simulation in which everyone lives: a world of destruction, death, and collapse.

The Real returns, at least for a moment – 9/11 back then, the economic crisis now – as something tangible, only to be transformed into an image, a video, a numerical figure: a process of re-virtualisation that allows us to tame the impact of the event (whether traumatic or not). The West does not experience war as a direct experience, but as a disruption of its own system of simulation. The Real returns, but it returns as data, not as experience. The events of 9/11 became experiential: while the trauma exceeded representation, mediation simultaneously framed the event symbolically, making it more watchable for the wider public. Isn’t the same true of Iran?

Until 28 February, Iran was narrated through bodies: protests, women, repression. Once geopolitical interests shifted, the country began to be narrated through markets: oil, Hormuz, energy routes. Iran has not changed; what has changed is the way we look at it.

Žižek poses a question that undermines the very foundations of Western consciousness: “What if nothing momentous actually happened on 11 September?” (Žižek, 2002, p.52). The attack is interpreted as an opportunity for the United States to realise what kind of world it was part of, to acknowledge the context that, in part, it had itself helped to create. The economic crisis raises the same question once again. The past fifty years speak of America’s great responsibilities, in the light of the events of the Cold War, which have now resulted in the situation where we are (finally) the victims. And this victimhood stems from the legitimisation of violence, of attacks, of bombs. It becomes clear how, just as then, talk of democracy, justice and rights is reduced to the surface-level mechanisms of biopolitical discipline. The Desert of the Real and the traumatic interruption of the symbolic order allow political discourse to intervene with a re‑organisational function.

Who, then, remains as the object of the Real? Who endures it without filters and without simulation?

Recent reports from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights indicate that since the beginning of the Israeli‑American attack, at least nine people have been executed in connection with the January protests, ten for alleged affiliation with opposition groups, and two for espionage. It is estimated that more than 4,000 people have been arrested, tortured, and subjected to other forms of physical and psychological violence, including forced confessions and mock executions. As the High Commissioner for Human Rights declared, the rights of the Iranian people continue to be stripped away in harsh and brutal ways. Conditions in prisons remain critical: overcrowding, lack of food, hygiene products, and medical supplies, along with the transfer of dozens of detainees to unknown locations, reproduce unsustainable detention conditions.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports data from the Iranian Ministry of Health updated to 1 May. At least 3,375 civilians have been killed and 32,214 injured nationwide, with the highest incidence in Tehran, Hormozgan, and the province of Isfahan. Nearly 200,000 people—60% of whom are women and children—have been temporarily displaced to neighbouring states, particularly Turkey. The figures remain uncertain and approximate due to the lack of updated counter‑verification.

The Iranian crisis reveals a deep fracture in Western consciousness: the distance between what we produce and what we recognise. Suffering does not enter our horizon as trauma but as informational flow, as interference in the simulation we call “current events”. In this sense, the Desert of the Real continues to elude us, neutralised even before our perception grasps the trauma, trapping us in the superficially familiar dimension of indifference. And while the lives of ninety million Iranians hang by a thin thread of freedom, you—like me—continue to complain about the price of gas?