most of what you write i agree with; but i think it's inconsistent. i'll try and explain this inconsistency a little. first, i think that there is a deep ambivalence in marx on the question of theoretical mastery, and indeed thereby in marxism. yes, i agree that the idea that theory can grasp the world is, as you say, contrary to marx. this seems to me an important principle, a recognition that theory and concepts will always be inadequate to the world, to the real. but i would say there is also an ambivalence on this question, and one that arises because marxism is not simply a theoretical practice but also a political one, in which a desire for transformation, and the provision of discourses and concepts which would aid in that transformation, easily passes from regarding theory as an aid to regarding it as the (pre)condition, or at least deliverer, of political mastery and hence transformation.
now, were we to take marx's writings as a whole (and by no means regard them as a coherent whole in which contradictions and hesitations can be flattened out and resolved), i think it's quite easy to see (and here is where Balibar's work is i think invaluable) that a) there is no single formulation of this excessive object/subject (it is variously presented as the proletariat, masses, working class, society, history, labour...); b) the relationship between these concepts changes (eg., the masses make history, but not under conditions of their own making, etc) and is by no means stable; and c) the instability of these concepts and their relation is a function of, variously, the need to create conceptual artefacts in order to account for particular circumstances and events (eg, the concept of the labour aristocracy in writings on Britain), the presentation of a narrative through which to present the lines of possibility (eg, the inevitable reduction of the world to two classes, proletarianisation in the _Manifesto_), and an ongoing theoretical and political committment to, and acknowledgement of, the insufficiency of theory, which thereby leaves the space open within his writings for such an instability of conceptualisation, for the excess. and i don't mean instability as a bad thing by any means.
another way of saying this (the option chosen by Balibar, Negri, Tronti, Bologna, and even Marx most forcefully in _Grundrisse_ and _Capital_) is that the identity of the class (as class, as proletariat, as masses) is the conjunctural moment of the antagonism. if there were no discepancy between the two, theory would be redundant because it would already by accomplished for all time, or at least for the time of the capitalist 'epoch' of which we are most interested in.
so, in citing the _Grundrisse_, where marx figures this excess as society, we should also keep in mind that elsewhere (_poverty of philosophy_ i think as well as the _Grundrisse_) marx crticises the use of this as a false abstraction, as a hypostasis, or presents quite different concepts. likewise, when you identify this excess as "the human who continous [the humans who continue] to exist outside the most complete theory", you risk a similar hypostasis: simultaneously opening that space and closing it by naming it 'human', mustering all the senses in which 'to be human' is premised on 'inhuman', not to mention the rather tedious debates which preoccupied over a decade of marxism and still do over 'agency' and 'structure'. ie., no concept can be presented as an undivided concept (guarded against its negation), thereby rendering what cannot be fully grasped by theory as an abstraction which seems to, hopes to, grasp all.
it's inconsistent therefore to claim otoh that theory cannot grasp this excess which simultaneously determines the character of a given problematic (of theory) and, otoh, settle for a term which identifies this excess. that is to say, we can and must identify, and it is indeed possible to do so on a conjunctural basis to a large extent; but we cannot settle for such identifications in such a way as to pretend that they are not in fact concepts. it is one thing to assert the necessity of a space for an incontrovertible object in theory, quite another to assert that how a particular theory grasps this space at a certain moment exhausts that reality or indeed takes place outside theory and without concepts -- ie., to engage at some point in the fantasy of theoretical mastery, or at least an anxiety in whose mood we defend such identifications from their own negativity. there is no epistemology which can grant us this adequacy; but there is a theoretical practice which i think can work through, as a matter of principle, this inadequacy of theory to the real, what marx called a materialist dialectic, what adorno calls negative dialectics, etc. that is, the way in which we can open theory to this excess is to regard one of the important tasks of theory as being alert to the negative, and in particular the negative sides of the concepts through which we would grasp such an excess at a given moment.
finally, no amount of playing with the concepts will acheive a dissolution of those concepts. to assert otherwise seems to me to be re-asserting that, yes, finally, theoretical mastery is possible and that political mastery flows from this. what provides the shift, and indeed the dissolution of any conceptual schema, is an event as you say, such as the Paris Commune. marx is great because he already had a theoretical practice which was open to the force of that which would always be irreducible to theory. the question is not how would we decide upon a means to verify this or that theory (ie., an epistemology), but how we would be able to do theory which was at least humbled enough by its own inadequacy to grasp the world -- open, in short, to the movements of the class struggle, the figurations of such, class composition and decomposition, etc. none of this seems to me at all separate from either how we might sit down to write an analysis of (say) the events in east timor or how we might sit down to work out appropriate organisational forms and strategies. i certainly have never felt it hampered me in (or distracted me from) those things; quite to the contrary: i think it is a central premise.
now, the bottom line seems to me to be that unless capitalism has been dissolved, then no matter how powerful the wish to dissolve it in theory, then we have dissolved none of 'it's' concepts. problematics can explode to be sure and have certainly done so along the lines you say (the russian revolution, the collapse of the USSR, the Paris Commune, etc); but they have not for all that dissolved or resolved much. i would say that the problematics of the subject as history and of history as subject for instance are still very much with us, even if the manner of their problematic is posed in a different way because of recent events. the same goes for 'human', and not simply because of its relation to the aforementioned concepts; but also because of the changes to the limit-points and divisions of 'human' in its relation to the opposite terms: machine, animal, and indeed the industrialisation of bare life that DNA stuff pre-figures. moreover, it is no surprise that a shift in problematics is presented (but not for all that occurs) by way of a so-called 'return to marx', a 'return to freud', etc. we might seek to write about the future and changed circumstances, but this is always from the conceptual terrain we have bequeathed to us. otherwise it would be unintelligible and unspeakable. nor is it a surprise that people reach all the ways back to, for instance, the moment when capitalism began as a critique of theocracy and feudalism, before bourgeios philosophy had resolved its own conceptual horizon because of the threat of the masses, eg, Spinoza, in order to import concepts and their relations which re-configure a problematic we have come to think of as the totality.
after the long ramble, the only thing i'd say is that when i hear the word Resolution or Dissolution i hear guns being unholstered -- because that autonomous existence of the real, of the excess, of what you call 'society' (and i would perhaps call antagonism and the real movement of the class struggle) is being lined up for the enclosures of theory, too often enough backed by armed force for us to be coy about it or to subordinate it under pragmatism and the need to defend of the realm. the counter-revolution begins (or is, by definition) the aspiration to assert an identity as the resolution of antagonism. if this seems like too theoretical a construct, then we need only remind ourselves that the first to be shot were those within the party.
well, perhaps the last thing i'd add is that the fact remains that even the most apparently speculative philosophies can, if one knows how to read them, offer a thoroughly materialist insight into the times, simply by virtue of being open to the world. eg, if we can hear the guns of Jena as Hegel writes, then we should more than easily (because it is there on the page in a way it is not with Hegel) be able to hear the wars in Yugoslavia in Zizek, the collapse of the USSR and the explosion of racism in Balibar, the formation of the EU and Fortress Europe in Agamben, the battles over the PCF in Derrida, the etc... if people find it hard to hear these things, then i'd argue it's because they do not understand the specificity of the idiom or, the more likely explanation for missreading, they assume everyone else's idiom is offered as much as a universal as they assume their own to be. and, just as there's really a kind of global US protectionism, so too there's a kind of implicit beleif that a US idiom is universal...
Angela _________