We kindly invite you to a lecture by Dr. Bojan Volf entitled “Milgram’s ideal subject”, which will take place as part of the Tuesday Meeting on Tuesday, March 4, 2025, at 11 a.m. in the library of the Institute of Criminology.
At the end of October 2024, Analecta published the book “Psychology as Material Practise”, which critically examines some of the most famous social experiments from the middle of the 20th century: Milgram’s experiment, Asch’s experiment, Rosenthal’s experiment, Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance… The experiments mentioned above are widely known, frequently cited and rarely problematized. In contrast to the “domesticated” view of them, the book enlivens the theoretical reflection, the socio-political, pedagogical and “dramatic” issues behind these experiments. In this lecture, we will focus specifically on some overlooked aspects of the infamous Milgram experiment, which Gordon Allport called the Eichmann experiment: from the early critique of the experiment to the contradictory nature of social relations in the experiment itself, from Milgram’s “scientific” examination of authority from the position of authority to the phantasmatic framework of science, from the question of the “naïve” subject to the question of who the real subject of the experiment is.
Bojan Volf received his doctorate in 2023 under the mentorship of Prof. Dr. Alenka Zupančič. His theoretical interests are related to theoretical psychoanalysis, the epistemology of the scientific sciences, the philosophy of education and the critique of ideology. So far, he has published articles in the journals Problemi, Sodobna pedagogika and Andragoška spoznanja, and the above-mentioned book is his literary debut.
