  This paper focuses on rate-independent damage in elastic bodies. Since the
driving energy is nonconvex, solutions may have jumps as a function of time,
and in this situation it is known that the classical concept of energetic
solutions for rate-independent systems may fail to accurately describe the
behavior of the system at jumps. Therefore we resort to the (by now
well-established) vanishing viscosity approach to rate-independent modeling,
and approximate the model by its viscous regularization. In fact, the analysis
of the latter PDE system presents remarkable difficulties, due to its highly
nonlinear character. We tackle it by combining a variational approach to a
class of abstract doubly nonlinear evolution equations, with careful regularity
estimates tailored to this specific system, relying on a q-Laplacian type
gradient regularization of the damage variable. Hence for the viscous problem
we conclude the existence of weak solutions, satisfying a suitable
energy-dissipation inequality that is the starting point for the vanishing
viscosity analysis. The latter leads to the notion of (weak) parameterized
solution to our rate-independent system, which encompasses the influence of
viscosity in the description of the jump regime.
