Late Style and Knowledge. On the Last Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke

Abstract

After discussing the conceptual consistency of “late style” with reference to Adorno’s and Derrida’s philosophy, the article aims at disclosing how Rilke’s late poems seem to move away from the ductus which characterized their poetic structure. While Rilke’s style, thanks to its Nietzschean origin, was especially concerned with the creation of metaphors evoking a meaning which was supposed to be absent, his poems written in the last decade before his death show his late style developing an unprecedented rhetoric of the presence.