In choosing to analyze Levinas’ reflection on the theme of “memory and the immemorial”, my purpose in the following pages will be less to engage in an exegesis of his thought than to examine, in its perspective, the theme of memory itself. Levinas elaborated his interpretation of memory in its relation to the immemorial above all in his work Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (Otherwise than Being: Or Beyond Essence), first published in 1978 and translated into English twenty years later. It is on this work that my analysis will focus. Levinas proposes in this work to distinguish his interpretation of memory from the predominant conceptions of memory that had been elaborated in different ways by earlier philosophical traditions and my primary task will be to reflect on the sense and scope of memory - its place in the “domain of being”, according to Levinas’ formulation - by indicating in light of these traditions what appears to me to be the problematic implications of the idea of memory that Levinas develops.
What is remarkable in Levinas’ idea of memory in the work Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence is the radicalism of the dichotomy he establishes between memory, on one hand, and the “immemorial” on the other. And, far from an isolated aspect of his thinking, this dichotomy is founded on a presupposition which reaches to the heart of his philosophy: the irreducible distinction he draws between immanence and transcendence, between “essence” and what is beyond essence. Given that for Levinas essence signifies “being, which is different from entities” (l’être différent de l’étant), the same radicalism which distinguishes essence and what is beyond essence separates being and what is “otherwise than being”.