We study three comonads derived from the comma construction. The induced coalgebras correspond to the three concepts displayed in the title of the paper. The comonad that yields the *-autonomous categories is, in essence, the Chu construction, which has recently awaken much interest in computer science. We describe its couniversal property. It is right adjoint to the inclusion of *-autonomous categories among autonomous categories, with lax structure-preserving morphisms. Moreover, this inclusion turns out to be comonadic: *-autonomous categories are exactly the Chu-coalgebras.