Edmund Husserl, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Inner time-consciousness has a triple structure at the level of constituted temporal objects: primal impression (the now-phase that currently presents the temporal object), retention (the just-past held within the now as just-having-been), and protention (the immediate anticipation of the next now-phase).12345 Below this constituted level there is the absolute time-constituting flow of consciousness — a self-affecting, self-temporalizing structure that constitutes time itself and cannot itself be temporal in the same sense as what it constitutes.
Retention is not a memory or re-presentation of a past now; it is the passive holding of the just-past within the living present, structurally distinct from active recollection.
But we can say: A temporal object 23 The text of 16-17 is based on sheets" 38"-"40" of the lecture manuscript of 1905. - Editor's note. 24 On acts as constituted unities in the original consciousness of time, cf. 37, p. 79f. is perceived (or intended impressionally) as long as it is still being generated in continuously emerging new primal impressions.On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, p. 99
Each of these phases has the peculiarity that it is consciousness of the earlier now, "original memory" of it. It does not "re-present" in the manner in which a recollection would; it instead re-presents or holds back [zuriickhiilt] what was 35 previously intended in the mode of the now in a primal sensation. It holds it back in the form of a new mode, which continuously issues forth from the primal sensing.On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, pp. 440–441
The diagram therefore gives a complete picture of the double continuity of running-off modes. 11. Primal Impression and Retentional Modification 13 The" source-point" with which the "production" of the enduring object begins is a primal impression.On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, p. 89
Now if we again take up the question whether a retentional 25 consciousness is conceivable that would not be the continuation of an impressional consciousness, we must say: Such a consciousness is impossible, for every retention intrinsically refers back to an impression. "Past" and" now" exclude one another.On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, [35]
Rather, each later retention is not only continual modification that has arisen from primal impression; each is also continual modification of all earlier continuous modifications of that same initial point. Up to now we have taken into consideration principally the 35 perception or original constitution of temporal objects and have attempted to understand analytically the time-consciousness given in them.On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, pp. 89–90
The time-consciousness analysis is among the most technically demanding and most influential of Husserl's contributions. Heidegger edited the 1928 publication; Merleau-Ponty extended the analysis in Phenomenology of Perception (1945); Derrida's Speech and Phenomena (1967) mounted the most sustained critique, charging that the privilege of the living present rests on a metaphysics of presence that retention's own structure of repetition and iterability undermines. Brough, Bernet, and Zahavi defend the structure against the Derridean critique, arguing that the absolute flow is itself already structured as self-affection, not as pure self-presence. The C-Manuscripts (published late) substantially complicate any reading that assumes a simple Cartesian self-present consciousness.