James Mensch: Husserl’s Account of our Consciousness of Time: Marquette University Press, 2010, 278 pp. $29.00, ISBN 13: 978-0-87462-801-2 [Book Review]

In Husserl’s Account of our Consciousness of Time, James Mensch brings extensive research to his explication of Husserl’s phenomenology of inner time-consciousness and provides an original interpretation of Husserl’s position. The text begins with a review of several philosophers of time who influenced Husserl: Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, James, and Brentano. With these sections, Mensch sets up his own analysis of Husserl’s phenomenology of time. He then works through Husserl’s descriptions of our experience of time, addressing retention and protention, the ego, consciousness, intersubjectivity, affectivity, the instincts, and the body. Mensch identifies an ‘‘aporia’’ in Husserl’s work on time, such that ‘‘time-constituting phenomena’’, i.e., retention and protention, are described on the one hand as timeless and pre-individual, and on the other hand (in various manuscripts) as associated with the instincts and drives. He then suggests, as a conclusion to his work, that the body is the source of retention and protention, and thus of temporality.