Merleau-Ponty's C?zanne

Extract: >Merleau-Ponty's Cézanne seeks to illustrate Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology as a critique of the doubt of thought that enables the infinity of perception. The book explains how Cézanne's color modulations suspend Cézanne's doubt, in contrast to Descartes' Cogito, and illustrates the infinity of perception with examples. In describing the possibility of modulation to deform and reform the world around me, Merleau-Ponty describes the human ability to transcend the boundary between the flesh and the perceived world, which enables the mind to perceive anew through the hand. Quote: "The percept is the landscape before man, in the absence of man. [...] But why do we say this, since in all these cases the landscape is not independent of the supposed perceptions of the characters and, through them, of the author's perceptions and memories? How could the town exist without or before man, or the mirror without the old woman it reflects, even if she does not look at herself in it? [...] This is Cézanne's enigma, which has often been commented upon: Man is absent from but entirely within the landscape." (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy)