I'm struggling to understand Blanchot's poetics on this theme. So I turned to this

Otto Dix, The Skull, 1924

This is a gruesome image of decay and worms investing a human skull. It is meant to symbolize the indescribable horrors of the first World War. For Dix and other European artists of the WWI era, skulls were powerful tools to express the dark reality of death that the disaster of war inevitably brings.