FOLLOWING MATERIALITY167terial for it.”^10 Nonetheless, Cézanne provided the possibility for a de-
parture: the opportunity for degrees of nonaffirmation to infiltrate the his-
tory of anthropocentrism in painting and art history. The paradox
intrinsic to the episteme of the modern age, one that defines Cézanne’s
still-life work, lies in the acknowledgment that being human means to be
caught between the immanent and the transcendent—simultaneously ob-
ject to be studied and subject who studies, surrounded by the unthought
and simultaneously functioning as source of intelligibility, the source and
the result of history, the epistemic modality of the modern age.^11
In The Order of Things, Foucault emphasizes the self-reflective na-
ture of measurable finitude through the emergence of modern disciplines.
Anthropology therefore became the discipline preoccupied with calling
into question man’s very essence, his finitude, his relation with time, and
FIGURE 5.2 Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Apples and Peaches, 1905. Oil on canvas.
31 7/8 × 39 9/16 in. (81 × 100.5 cm). Open-access image courtesy of the National Gallery
of Art, Washington, DC.