Even those familiar with Roland Barthes’s highly variegated output might be surprised to learn that, in 1960, he was contracted to write the script for a documentary on sport, to be aired a year later by the Canadian Broadcasting Company under the title “Le Sport et les hommes.” The text he provided — which was left out of both Le Seuil editions of Barthes’s “Oeuvres complètes” — has now been published in English as “What Is Sport?” (Yale University Press, 84 pages, $15).

The thin volume resembles Barthes’s “Mythologies,” which he wrote just three years before, insofar as it aims at uncovering the fraught characteristics of what appear to be perfectly naturalized activities — spectatorship and competition. Rather than find reasons to condemn them, Barthes sees in these activities a surprisingly noble end. In his obsession with what he calls “the obstinate heaviness of things” and “the immobility of nature,” he celebrates sports, with their emphasis on speed, momentum, and a mastery of objects, as an attempt to counteract the forces of gravity and inertia that govern human existence. The ultimate end of athletic achievement, he writes, is nothing less than a “victory over ignorance, fear, necessity.”

Broken into five very brief sections — on bullfighting in Spain, car racing in Florida, the Tour de France, hockey in Canada, and football in England — Barthes’s commentary appears uninterrupted on every right-hand page of the volume, while on left-hand pages are black-and-white photos of athletes engaged in strenuous movements, and selected quotes from the text, enlarged for emphasis. The volume skirts the line between picture book and serious work of philosophy — which is perhaps appropriate, considering its provenance.

At the heart of Barthes’s argument is his belief that modern sport descends from ancient spectacle “reduced to its forms, cleared of its effects, of its dangers, and of its shames: it loses its noxiousness, not its brilliance or its meaning.” (A generously positive view in light of what many see as the preposterously elevated stakes and aggressiveness associated with sport viewing and participation nowadays, not to mention the current steroid scandal that has enveloped the sports world of late.) He reveals a remarkably intimate knowledge of his subject matter, as when he notes that race cars lack starters, for “to suppress a few kilos is to gain a few seconds.” His sense of the psychological terms of sport, too, is sharp: “Once the race starts, an implacable economy will govern each atom of movement, for time is henceforth everywhere.” But it is the occasional compacted, gem-like thought for which Barthes is justly known that makes the volume memorable. When he states, “Sport is the entire trajectory separating a combat from a riot,” one can only chuckle at the idea of a talking head making such an observation today.

Mr. Harlin is a reporter at New York magazine.