In this book, he posits that in order to avoid further global catastrophe due to coronavirus disease 2019, the world would need to implement a "new form of ... communism", loosely defined as the construction of a "global organisation that can control and regulate the economy" along with a "global healthcare network", both marked by a general shift away from "market mechanisms".

[citation needed] Žižek insists that "we should resist the temptation to treat the ongoing epidemic as something that has a deeper meaning".

[2] Yohann Koshy of The Guardian wrote that "Žižek has spent his career writing in anticipation of a world-historic moment like the coronavirus pandemic, a truly totalising event that would allow the Hegelian philosopher – Hegel's being a totalising philosophy – to deploy his skills on the frontline.

"[1] Žižek takes the pandemic to be not only an invitation to a new form of global political organisation but as a call to rethink philosophy itself.

The revolutionary nature of an event like a pandemic is not merely practical but inherently theoretical as, in his own words, "we will have to experience a true philosophical revolution".