Amor mundi: The Ecology and Praise of Transience in Rilke’s Duino Elegies

Abstract Among the many puzzles in Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies is the ninth elegy’s declaration that the things of the world are disappearing, but that the only way to rescue them from this fate is to make them ‘invisible’. To make sense of this paradoxical scenario, the present article first examines in the light of several theoretical frameworks (for example, Walter Benjamin’s aura, Jean-Luc Maron’s apophasis and Hannah Arendt’s natality) how Rilke portrays the relationship between praise and mourning, proposing as an interpretive key hymnic language’s depicted capacity to illuminate transience. The article then demonstrates how this dimension of Rilke’s text articulates a vision of an authentically ecological relation to phenomena, one that involves an ecstatic exchange between subject and environment and that ultimately upends paradigmatic hierarchies of ‘human/non-human’ by introducing a modality of love grounded in loss rather than in possession.