Accounting for mourning

...here, this title announces both a subject and, for Derrida, a tautology or identity in difference, precisely as it also enacts the explanation or account that it announces: a substitution, a translation, a switching between one and the other is mourning, and is accounting or calculating--that is, work, mourning work. Accounting is substituted for mourning: this is the account of mourning, for Derrida. In other words, the transit between accounting or calculation, and the work which we do in mourning, can be summed up in how, in The Politics of Friendship, "how many of us are there?" is precisely the question of the work of mourning and friendship. Am I the other? Which other am I? My body becomes a crypt for the incorporated/introjected other, and for every other. For each other is every bit other, for Derrida. Counting the others--mourning them--is, then, accounting for them, being responsible for them. And for me, who is included in the "us" of "how many of us are there?" I too am other (like in Levinas), and account for myself in counting the others. But counting is only accounting--that is, mourning work--if this counting is interminable, impossible, unable to be calculated or counted. For the moment I stop counting, I stop accounting. This is the double-bind of responsibility and friendship, which are mourning, for Derrida.