¹ Wallace, David Foster, Infinite Jest (London: Abacus, 2009), 572Google Scholar.

² Ibid., 1032.

³ Ibid., 382, 402.

⁴ Ibid., 777. The rearrangement of letters is even more blatant in French, where NATO is abbreviated as OTAN.

⁵ Ibid., 776.

⁶ Derrida, Jacques, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides,” in Borradori, Giovanna, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 92Google Scholar, 96.

⁷ Derrida, Jacques, “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy,” Oxford Literary Review, 6 (Dec. 1984), 3–37, 22Google Scholar.

⁸ Derrida, “Autoimmunity,” 92, 90, original emphasis.

⁹ Ibid, 90.

¹⁰ Wegner, Phillip E., Life between Two Deaths, 1989–2001: US Culture in the Long Nineties (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2009), 82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ Ibid, 9. See also Pease, Donald E., The New American Exceptionalism (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press)Google Scholar. It is particularly in the Introduction that Pease talks about state fantasy formation that induces subjects into interiorizing the processes, beliefs and desires of the state. Pease also compellingly discusses the “Thing” of the Nation with respect to the Enemy, which “has always already completed the destruction of the national Thing that it has always not yet accomplished” (18).

¹² Wegner, 24–25.

¹³ Agamben, Giorgio, State of Exception (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 16Google Scholar.

¹⁴ DeLillo, Don, Falling Man (London: Picador, 2007), 8Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Melley, Timothy, The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Banjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 473Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Jameson, Fredric, A Singular Modernity (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 28–29Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Sloterdijk, Peter, In the World Interior of Capital (Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2013), 9Google Scholar, 169.

¹⁹ Ibid., 5.

²⁰ On this note see, for example, Freudenthal, Elizabeth, “Anti-interiority: Compulsiveness, Objectification, and Identity in Infinite Jest,” New Literary History, 41, 1 (Winter 2010), 191–211Google Scholar. In this article about “anti-interiority” as a mode of resistance against a “closed-off inner life,” Freudenthal also comments on the novel's “distinctive form” in terms of “the hoarded collections of endnoted information, the sentences both excessive and obsessively precise, the drive to pack as much as possible into the syntactic and narrative spaces” (196). This type of narration is itself indicative of embeddedness.

²¹ See, for example, Hayles, N. Katherine, “The Illusion of Autonomy and the Fact of Recursivity: Virtual Ecologies, Entertainment, and Infinite Jest,” New Literary History, 30, 3, Ecocriticism (Summer 1999), 675–97Google Scholar; Holland, Mary K., “‘The Art's Heart's Purpose’: Braving the Narcisstic Loop of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 47, 3 (Spring 2006), 218–42Google Scholar; Burn, Stephen J., David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide (London and New York: Continuum, 2012)Google Scholar; Houser, Heather, “Infinite Jest's Environmental Case for Disgust,” in Cohen, Samuel and Konstantinou, Lee, eds., The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 118–42Google Scholar, in which Houser argues that solipsism, self-involvement, self-indulgence are “psychological analogs to the self-reflexive style of postmodern cultural forms” (120).

²² Sloterdijk, Peter, Terror from the Air (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), 108Google Scholar.

²³ Brown, Wendy, Walled States, Waned Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2014), 25Google Scholar.

²⁴ Ibid., 30–31. On the shared projects of wall-building between the US and Israel, see ibid., 8.

²⁵ Agamben, State of Exception, 51.

²⁶ Latour, Bruno, Aramis, or The Love of Technology (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1996), 222Google Scholar. See also 23, where Latour notes that “[b]y definition, a technological project is a fiction, since at the outset it does not exist, and there is no way it can exist yet because it is in the project phase.”

²⁷ Ibid., 24.

²⁸ Edwards, Paul N., The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold-War America (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1996), 1Google Scholar.

²⁹ Ibid., 7, 8.

³⁰ Gloag, John, Plastics and Industrial Design (London: George Allan and Unwin, Ltd, 1945), 26Google Scholar.

³¹ For more information on MIT's role in the development of centralized and automated defense systems, see Edwards, 75–93.

³² Agamben, 60.

³³ See, for example, Samuel Cohen, “To Wish to Try to Sing to the Next Generation: Infinite Jest's History,” in Cohen and Konstantinou, 59–79. Cohen also relates this “erasure” to literary expression and postmodernism (also with reference to Wallace's “E Unibus Pluram”) which, according to Wallace, “has lost its … power to make meaning, instead becoming empty” (72). In “E Unibus Pluram,” Wallace likens irony to “a sort of fetal position, a pose of passive reception of comfort, escape, reassurance,” and continues that irony “serves an almost exclusively negative function. It's critical and destructive, a ground-clearing.” Wallace, David Foster, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (London: Abacus, 2011), 41Google Scholar, 67.

³⁴ Wallace, Infinite Jest, 184.

³⁵ Ibid., 186, 582.

³⁶ Ibid., 460, 983 n. 3, 521.

³⁷ Ibid., 83.

³⁸ Ibid., 12, 399, 508.

³⁹ Ibid., 263.

⁴⁰ Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, 67.

⁴¹ Agamben, 6.

⁴² Wallace, Infinite Jest, 394.

⁴³ Derrida, “Autoimmunity,” 96.

⁴⁴ Wallace, Infinite Jest, 127.

⁴⁵ Agamben, 15.

⁴⁶ See Melley, The Covert Sphere; but also Grausam, Dan, On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2011)Google Scholar; and Piette, Adam, The Literary Cold War: 1945–Vietnam (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ Edwards, The Closed World, 276.

⁴⁸ Wallace, Infinite Jest, 383.

⁴⁹ See Edwards, 293. It was a success because its proponents could claim the moral advantage – they were in favor of a defensive arrangement – and therefore managed to undermine the Nuclear Freeze Movement.

⁵⁰ Ibid., 289.

⁵¹ Wallace, Infinite Jest, 9.

⁵² See, for example, Richard G. Hewlett and Francis Duncan's history of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), whose second volume is called Atomic Shield, 1947–1952: A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission (University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1969).

⁵³ Rhodes, Richard, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 673Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ Ibid., 671 (emphasis original).

⁵⁵ On this note see, for example, Baudrillard, Jean, The System of Objects (London: Verso, 2005)Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ Hales, Peter Bacon, Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project (Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1997), 360Google Scholar.

⁵⁷ In De Lillo's, DonUnderworld (New York: Scribner, 1997), 514Google Scholar, young Eric jacks off into a condom “because it had a sleek metallic shimmer, like his favorite weapons system.”

⁵⁸ Pynchon, Thomas, Gravity's Rainbow (London: Vintage, 2000), 723Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ Edwards, The Closed World, 82.

⁶⁰ Ronald Reagan quoted in Thompson, E. P., “Why Is Star Wars?”, in Thompson, , ed., Star Wars (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd, 1985), 16Google Scholar.

⁶¹ Wallace, Infinite Jest, 382.

⁶² This is, amongst other things, what Slavoj Žižek argues in Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 27, in which he notes that the US, in the Cold War and the “war on terror,” is in each case fighting “its own excessive outgrowth.”

⁶³ Wallace, Infinite Jest, 382. This is precisely the argument that both Pease and Wegner make in their respective, and compelling, books. See Wegner, Life between Two Deaths, and Pease, The New American Exceptionalism.

⁶⁴ Wallace, Infinite Jest, 382.

⁶⁵ Ibid., 383.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 381.

⁶⁷ On the subject of plastics and modernity see Brown, Judith, “Cellophane Glamour,” Modernism, Modernity, 15, 4 (Jan. 2008), 605–26Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ Wallace, Infinite Jest, 407.

⁶⁹ Baudrillard, Jean, The System of Objects (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 43Google Scholar.

⁷⁰ Wallace, Infinite Jest, 105.

⁷¹ Nichols, Catherine, “Dialogising Postmodern Carnival: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest,” Critique, 43, 1 (Fall 2001), 3–16, 7Google Scholar.

⁷² Wallace, Infinite Jest, 572.

⁷³ Nichols, 7.

⁷⁴ Ibid.

⁷⁵ Warren Steele, “Body of Glass: Cybernetic Bodies and the Mirrored Self,” PhD diss., University of Glasgow, Nov. 2007, 155.

⁷⁶ Ibid., 156.

⁷⁷ Wallace, Infinite Jest, 986, 987, 988.

⁷⁸ Ibid., 230.

⁷⁹ Ibid., 394, 385, 241. Gentle most clearly functions as a distorted reflection of John F. Kennedy, though he also employs Eisenhower's election strategy (New Look) as well as Nixonian schemes of MADness in angry outbursts – he threatens to detonate upside-down missiles in their silos and to irradiate Canada by means of ATHSCME fans if ONANite rearrangement is opposed (407). With respect to Kennedy, Gentle's second Inaugural Address deforms JFK's first presidential speech: “Let the call go forth, to pretty much any nation we might feel like calling, that the past has been torched by a new and millennial generation of Americans” (381).

⁸⁰ Ibid., 241.

⁸¹ Ibid., 391.

⁸² Ibid., 240, 241.

⁸³ Ibid., 241.

⁸⁴ These four phases are the “boost phase,” during which the rocket boosters lift the gadget into outer space; the “post-boost phase,” the period immediately after the rocket motors burn out during which the post-boost vehicle, the “bus,” dispenses its warheads to travel their separate arcs of disaster and releases any decoys or other penetration aids; the “mid-course phase” throughout which these warheads and decoys streak toward their destinations; and finally the “terminal phase,” the moment the weapons enter the atmosphere and hit their targets. Van Evera, Stephen, “Preface,” in Miller, Steven E. and Van Evera, Stephen, eds., The Star Wars Controversy: An International Security Reader (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), ix–xxi, xiGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁵ Ben Thompson, “What Is Star Wars?”, in Thompson, Star Wars, 32. See also Burrows, William E., “Ballistic Missile Defense: The Illusion of Security,” Foreign Affairs, 62 (Spring 1984), 849–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁶ Virilio, Paul and Lotringer, Sylvère, Pure War (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997), 94Google Scholar, 95.

⁸⁷ Wallace, Infinite Jest, 382.

⁸⁸ Ibid., 543, 181, 269.

⁸⁹ Ibid., 996. On nuclear strategy and postmodern aesthesis see Grausam, Dan, On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 76–103Google Scholar.

⁹⁰ Wallace, Infinite Jest, 570.

⁹¹ Ibid., 30–31.

⁹² Ibid., 82. “ETA's hilltop grounds are,” further, “traversable by tunnel.” Its subbasements, arrived at through these tunnels, used to host “former optical and film-development facilities” (51).

⁹³ Ibid., 30–31.

⁹⁴ Ibid., 63–64.

⁹⁵ Ibid., 63, 162.

⁹⁶ Ibid., 225, 570.

⁹⁷ Ibid., 1031.

⁹⁸ Ibid., 80, 1031.

⁹⁹ Ibid., 82 (emphasis original).

¹⁰⁰ Ibid., 82, 83. On the subject of play as supremely rational endeavor see also Bresnan, Mark, “The Work of Play in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest,” Critique, 50, 1 (Fall 2008), 51–68Google Scholar.

¹⁰¹ Wallace, Infinite Jest, 176, 261.

¹⁰² Ibid., 261, 67, 645.

¹⁰³ See Bresnan, 52.

¹⁰⁴ Wallace, Infinite Jest, 489, 439.

¹⁰⁵ Ibid., 650.

¹⁰⁶ Ibid., 127, 383.

¹⁰⁷ Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, 166.

¹⁰⁸ Barthes, Roland, Mythologies (London: Vintage, 1993), 97Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁹ Wallace, Infinite Jest, 187.

¹¹⁰ Baudrillard, America, 2.

¹¹¹ Wallace, Infinite Jest, 185.

¹¹² See, for example, Ballard, J. G., The Atrocity Exhibition (London: Flamingo, 2001)Google Scholar.

¹¹³ I would like to thank Mark Dorrian for reminding me of this movie through his excellent paper on “Vision, Motion and Miniaturization: The Political Imagery of Powers of Ten,” delivered at the Sensory Worlds: Environment, Value and the Multi-Sensory conference, 9 Dec. 2011, University of Edinburgh.

¹¹⁴ Wallace, Infinite Jest, 185.

¹¹⁵ Ibid., 186.

¹¹⁶ Ibid.

¹¹⁷ Ibid.

¹¹⁸ Ibid.

¹¹⁹ Yarsley, V. E. and Couzens, E. G., Plastics (Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin Books, 1941), 11Google Scholar.

¹²⁰ On this note, it is worth mentioning Buckminster Fuller and the 1960s London collective Archigram. Archigram, especially, proposed a mechanically determined aesthetic, inspired by the chemicals, electronics and aeronautics industries, and used plastic compounds to design inflatable living arrangements or NASA-style pods. See, for example, Sadler, Simon, Archigram: Architecture without Architecture (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2005)Google Scholar. On Buckminster Fuller see Gorman, Michael John, Buckminster Fuller: Designing for Mobility (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2005)Google Scholar.

¹²¹ See Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, 723; and Wallace, Infinite Jest, 1043.

¹²² This is a reference to “Forever Ware,” Eerie Indiana, dir. Joe Dante (DVD, Hearst Entertainment Productions, 2006), 15 Sept. 1991, in which a housewife preserves herself and her two eternally teenage boys in air-tight plastic pods.

¹²³ Wallace, Infinite Jest, 186.

¹²⁴ Ibid., 187.

¹²⁵ Ibid., 186.

¹²⁶ See, for example, Ndiaye, Pap A., Nylon and Bombs: DuPont and the March of Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

¹²⁷ Ibid., 407, 186.

¹²⁸ Frankl, Paul T., Form and Re-form: A Practical Handbook of Modern Interiors (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1930), 161Google Scholar.

¹²⁹ Meikle, Jeffrey L., American Plastic: A Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 2Google Scholar. On rocket societies see Winter, Frank H., Prelude to the Space Age: The Rocket Societies 1924–1940 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

¹³⁰ Frankl, 163, 5.

¹³¹ Frankl, Paul T., Machine-Made Leisure (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1932), 12Google Scholar.

¹³² Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, 249.

¹³³ Gloag, Plastics and Industrial Design, 17.

¹³⁴ Ibid., 53.

¹³⁵ Ibid.

¹³⁶ Ibid., 45.

¹³⁷ Yarsley and Couzens, Plastics, 10.

¹³⁸ Ibid., 12.

¹³⁹ Barthes, Mythologies, 97.

¹⁴⁰ Ibid., 97.

¹⁴¹ Wallace, Infinite Jest, 384.

¹⁴² On this note, see Pynchon, who writes that plastic (or Imipolex G's) “target property most often seemed to be strength – first among Plasticity's virtuous triad of Strength, Stability and Whiteness (Kraft, Standfestigkeit, Weisse).” Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, 250.

¹⁴³ Yarsley and Couzens, 154.

¹⁴⁴ Ibid., 154, 155.

¹⁴⁵ Ibid., 158.

¹⁴⁶ Wallace, Infinite Jest, 1043.

¹⁴⁷ Grace Lovat Fraser, “Different Types of Plastics, Their Properties and Uses,” in Gloag, Plastics and Industrial Design, 78.

¹⁴⁸ Ibid., 79.

¹⁴⁹ Wallace, Infinite Jest, 384, 287.

¹⁵⁰ Barthes, Mythologies, 97.