ABSTRACT
It may seem odd to start a book with a series of provocations directed at the three terms juxtaposed in the book’s title. But it is not: Much of what this book has become concerns what is powerfully provoked by the relativity and contingency of each of those terms, as well as their manufactured modern reifications or ontologies, the consequences and effects of which – no less than their terrors – are of profound concern today in not a few parts of the contemporary world.
