Futurity and Finitude in the Canso de la crozada 

This essay reads the thirteenth-century Old Occitan epic Canso de la crozada through Jean-Luc Nancy’s theories of community and communal mythologies. Through its analysis of the Canso’s unfinished manuscript decorations and the presence of two politically opposed poets, it shows that the creation of myth in the chansons de geste is the result of historical desires. In so doing, this essay also expands the theoretical world available to Nancy’s readings of the “communal” and provides a frame for theorizing his engagements with time as ideological by revealing how the past and the possible speak to one another in his work.