Exact collinearity means that one feature is a linear combination of others.
Covariance is bilinear; therefore, if $X_2 = a X_1$ (where $a\in \mathbb R$),
$$\mathrm{cov}(X_1, X_2) = a\ \mathrm{cov} (X_1, X_1) = a. $$
Likewise if $X_n$ is some more complicated linear combination of $X_1, \cdots, X_{n-1}$ with coefficients $a_1, \cdots$,
$$\mathrm{cov}(X_i, X_n) = \sum_{j=1,\cdots,n} a_j\ \mathrm{cov}(X_i, X_j) . $$
Since the covariance matrix $\Sigma$ has as as its $i$-th row $\Sigma_{i.}$ the vector $[\mathrm{cov}(X_i,X_1),\cdots,\mathrm{cov}(X_i,X_n)]$, this means the entire $n$-th row will be a linear combination of the previous rows and the covariance matrix is rank-deficient.