From trauma to brain fog? Bodily and psychic dispossession in times of violence

What does the term ‘brain fog’ enable and what might it foreclose? In response to David Bissell's account of being ‘out of it’ through his analysis of the phenomenon and experience of brain fog, I consider how it opens questions of how body and mind might bear the ‘insults’ inflicted by both external and internal worlds. I speculate that accounts of brain fog might signal the supplanting of the logics of trauma (together with the compacted histories of psychoanalysis and psychiatry that trauma carries with it) and the installation of other ways of understanding embodiment, affect, and the wounds caused both by the external world and by illness/bodily change. In considering the ramifications of this potential shift, and through a reading of Palestinian poet Husam Maarouf's essay, ‘Hunger that defeats language’, I argue for not losing sight of the psyche in understanding inflictions that result in bodily – and psychic – dispossession.