Taking their cue from novelist's comments to Frank Budgen that he composed Sirens using the technical resources of (Ellmann 459), many theorist-critics have written about in Joyce. These writers locate in feeling and sensuality a resistance to incursions of a rationality they identify as, among other things, aggressive and abstract to point of being barren. Viewing thought as enemy, they seek to purge this oppressive spirit with supposedly nonrational matter they would thereby free. As a consequence, discussions initially concerned with something like Joyce's prosody quickly tend to focus on political and philosophical questions, particularly those associated with desire. (1) The deadly prose of mind, argument goes, is countered by poetic or body. In what follows, I consider idea of musical language in Sirens episode of Ulysses, not in order to cloak a tangential discussion of body, porous self, or textual subversion, but to think through significance of resemblance between music and language and to identify why critics have found it almost impossible keep this topic in view. (2) It is my contention that rather than rout critical intelligence, musicality in Ulysses allows readers to experience one of music's most striking effects--distraction. With help of Theodor Adorno's aesthetics, particularly Music and Language: A Fragment, I address question of standoff between art (defined as seduction, destruction, and falsehood) and reason (constructed as disinterestedness, preservation, and truth). I argue that musical mimesis does not just undermine thinking but is a kind of thinking itself. In this way I hope to restore to Sirens a cognitive content overlooked by much of Joyce criticism that takes sensuality to be adversary of a reason it consistently posits as wicked. I propose that very separation of art (mimesis/sensuality) and philosophy (cognition/identification) produces undesirable--that is, crude, distorting, and damaging--aspects of reason that poststructuralist and historicist critics contest. (3) However, it is not my goal to diminish importance of mimetic element in art. Neither subsuming art beneath (Adorno's) philosophy nor dismissing it as mere decoration, I consider political implications of Joyce's mediation of rational through sensual, sensual through rational. Derek Attridge takes Joyce's experiments with syntax in Sirens as music making in a literal sense. But emptying idea of musicality into post-Saussurean model of language to which he is committed, Attridge soon gets distracted from question of music that motivates his discussion. He argues that by reviving dormant prosody of prose, fearless of both unintelligibility and a short-circuiting of information transfer, Joyce liberates body from a dictatorial and englobing will, and allows its organs their own energies and proclivities (61). The study of musicality falls by wayside as classical poststructuralist concerns such as a thematics of breached subject take center stage. Attridge's observations about language and rampant autonomy of fetishised body parts in Sirens are extremely provocative, and represent a major contribution to literature on Ulysses. Nevertheless, his analysis of body soon also forgets its linguistic ground (a ground that he reminds us is long forgetful of its musical impulse) and develops into a sketch of a progressive politics driven by liberated sexuality. The release of body from tyranny of mind, Attridge claims, unleashes against repressive morality. Its utopian politics are not only problem with this approach. When Attridge actually describes sexuality, he reveals a major weakness with Anglo-American reception of French theory, or perhaps with theory itself: sexuality thrives on separation of body into separate parts, while a sexually repressive morality insists on wholeness and singleness of body and mind (or soul) (62). …