The notion of rhythm in the works of Stephane Mallarmé has a specific position upon which all the poet’s most taunting ideas refract. Following the line this notion opens, in the first step established are the parallels between Mallarmé’s aesthetic postulates and Husserl’s phenomenology. In the second step, the Husserl – Mallarmé parallel serves as a matrix for understanding some basic paradoxes of Derrida’s deconstruction. It will be shown that Derrida, too, was in search of a specific, distinctive rhythm. In the third step, it will be shown how from Mallarmé, over Derrida’s work-through, the rhythm (rhythm of appearance and rhythm of verse, rhythm of words and rhythm of whiteness) became one of the discrete, but most radical theoretical premises among some of the most influential philosophers of the postmodern: Agamben, Kristeva, Rancière, Nancy.