This chapter reinterprets Adorno’s critique of reification as a misrecognition of nature’s expressive agency. His central metaphor is the Sirens’ song in Homeric myth, which, read alongside Hegel’s lord–bondsman dialectic, transforms his recognition theory into a critique of human domination over nature. Odysseus’s outwitting of the Sirens allegorizes the constitution of sovereign subjectivity secured through the silencing of nature’s voice, while art becomes tasked with recalling what has been suppressed and giving it expression through semblance. Building on this metaphor, the chapter develops reification and semblance as key categories for a critical reformulation of Habermas’s communicative turn. Adorno proposes a “new categorical imperative,” grounded in aversion to somatic pain rather than reason, which at first seems to confirm Vogel’s Habermasian charge that Adorno’s Critical Theory is unable to state its normative foundations, since any discursive formulation would repeat the domination it opposes. Vogel, by contrast, secures critique by abandoning reconciliation with nature in favor of a purely discursive model. Against this, the chapter develops an Adornian account in which non-discursive materiality is not merely external to discourse but immanent in its fissures, keeping critique open and receptive to nature’s expressive agency.