abstract: This talk, reporting on an ongoing research project with A. Mielke and G. Savare', focuses on the the approximation of rate-independent problems by viscosity regularization. For taking the vanishing viscosity limit, we adopt a technique based on arc-length reparametrization and first introduced by A. Mielke and E. Efendiev. This leads, in the limit, to a novel energetic formulation for rate-independent problems, based on a local stability condition, which can in fact be given in a purely metric framework.